Prosecuting QC Victor Temple spent a long while churning through AIB credit committee reports on multi-million advances granted to Kallakis in the belief that alleged guarantees from Sun Hung Kai Properties of Hong Kong were genuine.

He is charged along with Alexander Williams, 43, on 21 counts of conspiracy to defraud. The pair deny all charges.

The alleged fraud pivots on alleged promises by third parties to guarantee higher rents for properties to be purchased. That increased their value, enabling higher loans.

AIB lent Kallakis £760 million to buy 16 properties between 2004 and 2007. These included the Telegraph Group HQ in Victoria, bought for £225 million in the summer of 2007 and the Apollo and Lunar House immigration offices in Croydon purchased for £21 million in 2006.

AIB seized all the properties in 2008 and sold them at a £56 million loss, hence the size of the claim. On Tuesday, former AIB manager Michael Cooke was taken through the credit committee reports by the prosecution. One was for a £12 million bridging loan advanced in 2006 to buy 32, St James's Square.

Kallakis planned to move his offices into the building and develop a 20,000 square-foot, super-luxury flat on the top floor to be sold for £105 million.The priciest flat in London at the time. This one loan was guaranteed by Oregon, a Kallakis-controlled company, registered in the British Virgin Islands. Cooke was closely questioned on the wisdom of relying on a guarantee from a company whose books were not audited by outside accountants.

The banker detailed the considerable steps that were taken by AIB to check out Oregon. The loan was approved. "But by then we had done nine transactions worth £229 million with two advances repaid," said Cooke.

The case continues.

Street dreams are made of this

Ever dreamed of buying Bond Street with real rather than Monopoly money? Cushman & Wakefield reckons the 145 shops in the golden half-mile between Oxford Street and Piccadilly are worth £3.5 billion.

The property agent says relentless retailer demand will send rents soaring 60% to £1500 a square foot by 2013 for zone A space - the first 20 feet back from the shopfront. Bond Street's 145 shopkeepers pay a total of £85 million a year in rent, C&W disclosed at an event last week with posh solicitors Boodle Hatfield.

So, Average & Average Jewellers, costing £24 million to buy, will bring £585,000 in rent, a slim 2.4% annual return. Values are simple multiples of rent. If rents rise 60%, your store will cost 60% more. Don't all rush. Half the shops lie in private hands. Few are ever traded. Not in the real world anyway.

Sky's the limit for super-hub

Forget a lone "Heathwick" rail link connecting Heathrow and Gatwick. What London needs is a rail nexus to connect not two, but five airports.

Locate this "constellation hub" at Old Oak Common, between Harlesden and Acton. Then Heathrow, Stansted, Luton and City airports lie within 30 minutes. So does Birmingham, thanks (one day, some day) to HS2, the high-speed rail line to all points north.

This vision was presented by Sir Terry Farrell, architect and master planner of the 143 acres north of the Westway and three miles west of Oxford Street. Sadly, the current plan is to turn this spaghetti junction of rail and tube lines into a shunting yard for Crossrail. Hammersmith & Fulham council leader, Stephen Greenhalgh, asked Sir Terry to dream up something better. A "transport super-hub" containing HS2 and Crossrail stations, connected to the Great Western main line, the Bakerloo line, the Central line, the North London line and the West London line was his answer. That would do away with the need for a third London airport in the Thames Estuary, he said.

Surrounding Old Oak Central is space for 10,500 homes and 12 million sq ft of shops and offices. Land values would soar from £1 million to maybe £10 million an acre, say agents CBRE. A windfall land tax on the uplift would help pay for the dream.

The Howard's end is Land Securities' big gain...

The 18th Duke of Norfolk, Edward Fitzalan Howard, 54, will have done well selling the freehold of the Howard Hotel on the embankment, which closed last week. But probably not as well as Land Securities will do replacing the 189 rooms with 151 balconied flats with spectacular views over the Thames.

In 2006 the UK's largest property company paid the Hong Kong-based Ho family £306 million for the 89 years left on a lease granted by the Fitzalan family for a three-acre site, which includes the Howard Hotel and Arundel Court, an ugly 1960s block once rented to Arthur Andersen.

LandSecs paid the Duke to extend the lease on Arundel Court, which is due to be replaced by a block almost twice the size. The land on which the flats will stand was bought outright, enabling the flats to be sold freehold.

Residential prices in central London have doubled since 2006, in this case from below £1500 a sq ft to more than £3000 a sq ft. The value of the 150,000 sq ft of residential space may now exceed £400 million. That will be more than LandSecs banked on in 2006 when it bought the lease for the site, which runs up to the Strand.

LandSecs was granted planning permission in 2009 for 584,000 sq ft of offices to replace 308,000 sq ft at Arundel Court after objections from Westminster Council to its scale were overruled. The developer has not yet committed to building anything. But work on the flats is likely to start before the offices. Which raises a thought: will LandSecs junk the offices for more flats, given the soaring prices?

Unlikely. But across the street another nasty 1960s office block is being replaced by flats. Maybe an exploratory chat with His Grace?